Man Without a Country
by Ellie12
Summary: He'd never promised to stay in Boston.  He just hadn't left yet.  Post "The Man from the Other Side"  2.19


**Title:** Man Without a Country**  
>Author:<strong> Ellie**  
>Rating:<strong> PG**  
>Spoilers:<strong> Post-"The Man from the Other Side" (2.19)**  
>Summary:<strong> He'd never promised to stay in Boston. He just hadn't left yet.

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><p>He knew how to disappear completely. He'd done it before, more than once. It would be easy to do again, now, after two stops and a pocket full of identities and colorful currencies. He felt the heavy edges of the passports against his knuckles as his hands burrowed deeper into the pea coat's pockets, trying to warm them from the cold without and within.<p>

Twenty minutes on the T, and he could be at the airport, twenty hours to anywhere around the world. He could sell arms or drugs or antiquities, tend bar or teach English. He could go be Pyotr making a diamond deal in Antwerp, or Shimon doing some programming in Prague, or Piers securing an oil pipeline deal through Kazakhstan. No one there would know him, or care where he came from. It would be so easy to go, so liberating. Even before, he'd never promised to stay in Boston. He just hadn't left yet.

Idly, he sipped at his cooling coffee and looked out across Boston Common as harried commuters whisked past and tourists dawdled, staring up at the gilded dome of the state house. The chilly morning breeze, still carrying a hint of winter, ruffled the haphazardly folded copy of the Financial Times on his knee and rattled the still-bare branches overhead. It would be nicer this time of year, he thought, in Sao Paulo. It would be easy to get there from here; no ID needed for the train, and a single-stop flight from Baltimore. He could be there for dinner.

He refolded the pink newspaper, and pretended to skim a story on real estate prices as he calculated logistics, and the weight of the money bundled in dollars and euros and Swiss francs, a thousand dollars, give-or-take. He'd need luggage before the flight, because traveling without was suspicious, and more money, enough for a round-trip ticket, because one way was suspicious, too. Cash for the train to Philadelphia, a simple suitcase of necessities in the city, a cash ticket to Washington he wouldn't use in its entirety; the train stopped right at BWI. By the time he was on the ground in Atlanta or Miami, he would have put enough time and possible transit points between those who might track him that it would be safe to access his bank account, that Credit Suisse account to which he'd kept the card hidden away, a relic of another life, still waiting for him if he ever chose it. As aliases went, Simon Becket wasn't a bad one, but unsubtle, and Olivia would recognize it in an instant as him, with one glance down a long list of daily bank transfers. By the time she'd tracked his withdrawal to an international travel hub, Simon would be long gone.

It would take time, if he wanted to look casual, unhurried, arouse no suspicion. The years had taught him patience. By breakfast tomorrow, perhaps, would be better. Would it give her too much time to find him? Olivia was smart, and canny enough that in another life, she could have been a criminal as easily as a federal agent. She would understand his instincts, know how to begin to follow his trail, even if she wouldn't know where he would go, whether Johannesburg or Jakarta or Juneau was the more likely destination.

If she had known, if she found him before he went airborne, maybe he would stay. He wasn't a criminal, or at least wasn't wanted for anything, and she couldn't force him to remain here. She would want him to stay, for reasons she'd give him and more she wouldn't, the unspoken ones carrying the most weight with him. But whatever he thought he felt for her just a week ago, she'd known, too, had kept it from him for how long? Had she always seen something, and just now realized? Or had she just now seen it, and still not told him, while holding him close enough to kiss? He wasn't sure which hurt more, but knew neither hurt as much as Walter's lifetime of betrayal.

Yet, he thought, sipping the lukewarm coffee, even knowing, she hadn't run from him. And he'd seen drugged racehorses less skittish than Olivia Dunham; by all rights and previous experience, he should have expected her to cut off all communication and sever contacts with both Bishops, running just as surely as he was now, without ever putting a physical mile between them. Or arrest Walter, though how you'd prosecute a man for cross-universe kidnapping, he wasn't quite sure. It felt like a crime.

A crime against him, against space-time and the universe. Universes? What had happened there, to his real parents, those people he couldn't remember who must have loved him just as much as Walter claimed to here, when he disappeared? Had they waited for him to return to them, to come home, to be ransomed? It seemed impossible that his lifelong sense of wanderlust was really as simple as a primitive, instinctual longing to go _home_. Nothing, nowhere, had ever felt like home, not that he could remember, not in a thousand beds in a thousand cities.

He flipped through the paper, and found the current exchange rate on the euro, recalling the last time he'd checked the bank balance, calculating. He'd never really been Peter Bishop, had never really belonged anywhere and never understood why. Now he knew, knew he didn't belong any place in this world, so he'd go, start over as whoever he wanted to be, whoever he felt like being for a month or a year, wherever the fancy struck until his luck or his money ran out.

Tossing the empty coffee cup in the trash, he stuffed the paper in one pocket, and headed south, merging with the crowds, heading for South Station. There was a lightness in his step he hadn't felt in two years; he was free. It was six hours to Philly, and he would have plenty of time to plan on the train.


End file.
